Calloway County Clerk Given Grant to Preserve Government Records

Calloway County Clerk Antonia Faulkner has received a more than $34000 government grant to preserve local government records.

The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives awarded the aid after the clerk’s office requested funds to transfer records to new hardware.

Faulkner said the former method of storing documents was obsolete and potentially damaging to the data.

Credit wikimedia commons

“These cards are from the sixties and up to the eighties, so on that part of it - the pictures are fading and that sort of thing. It’s just a better storage,” Faulkner said.

The new process includes digitizing data from physical aperture cards then storing it on a hard drive.

Faulkner said she hopes to make all archives available online to the public, but that won’t come for some time and may require another grant.

“So, the first grant got us on the files from a hard copy to an image on the computer. Then from there, we will take it upon ourselves or apply for another grant to maybe get the images accessible to the public,” Faulkner said.

Historians and genealogists now have digitized Confederate Army Pension Applications to comb through to aid their research. The Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives have them all available online. . State archivist Barbara Teague says the pension program was open to indigent veterans and their widows.

“They had to prove that they had less than $300 income per year and own less than $2,500 worth of property. So you had to prove that you really didn’t have any money and you needed this pension, which may have been $15 to $25 a month.”